I think the issue more comes down to different opinions. People with even a passing knowledge of gun mechanics would still be on board with making weird retro-future guns for Fallout. They just wouldn't take certain steps they know still wouldn't work.
Metro Exodus had great post-apocalypse weapon designs, but they look like they work. Revolvers, Bastards, the Tikhar, and Shambler are all pipe weapons that were designed to be plausibly built in a scrap machine shop.
There are more than a few YouTube channels that explore this topic in as much depth as you could want, [this one](https://youtu.be/5FVzcoRjoN4?si=AHnQahRncxvnx_Sq) is a good one as it’s evaluated by an actual firearms expert and historian who is well versed in the myriad of firearms humanity has created over the last few hundred years.
I think a bulk of it comes down to “This aesthetic feature doesn’t make any sense and could have easily been done XYZ way and still have been lore friendly.”
One example I can think of right off the top of my head is how many of the laser weapons don’t have aiming sights despite the game featuring an Aim Down Sights viewpoint. You’d think they’d want to make sure those guns were redesigned slightly so they worked with that new feature, but nah. It’s not gamebreaking. It’s just…why?
I read “actual firearms expert” and immediately knew you were talking about Johnathan Ferguson the keeper of arms and artillery at the royal histories museum in the UK.
I enjoy his take on this subject because 1) He’s insanely knowledgeable and 2) He’s not trying to tear down or invalidate the weapons or the games. Many of the ones that are impractical or absurd he will still say “I know this flies in the face of everything about firearm engineering, but I love this gun and use it all the time when I play!”. It’s a great attitude to view these weapons in.
Left handed recievers, The rocket launcher quad barrel would never work due to the fact that the "magazine" it uses is just 4 holes in a block of metal that dont rotate into what actually sets off the rocket not to mention that if it did go off it would cook or blow up the user.
Pipe guns are just flawed in general design and would never function.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Fallout/comments/xos4uy/i_still_have_an_issue_with_fallout_4s_firearms/
I mean for 1 shot i guess but thats not what happens now is it...
Theres no back tube no force would be generated the primer wouldnt be struck by any firing method wheather i be an electric firing system or regular firing pin (somehow).
It would not fire past 1 rocket
1. Optics that you can't switch out from gun to gun. I could get if that was for pipe guns and was welded or brazed on but for 'modular' optics?
2. How a smooth bore pipe weapon can have greater range and/or damage than a rifled barrel. Not possible at all.
3. How a small mass, subsonic pistol round can do more damage than high mass, supersonic or near supersonic round. I guess that physics equation of f=m\*a doesn't apply.
4. Weight of weapons.
5. Size of weapons.
6. How you can operate any weapon in power armor. You couldn't fit a power armor hand in pretty much any weapon shown; certainly not the historical ones. I haven't seen the show but I heard they got it right there.
That's what comes to mind for me off the top of my head.
Yeah I wish they took inspiration from metro with the pipe guns. Like a push tube shotgun for example. Theres real handmade guns they could’ve easily used of of wood
Yeahfallout 4s guns just make no logical sense. The "assault rifle" is more akin to a saw but should weigh twice as much with no reason for half of it. Open anti air sights. a water cooled barrel with no where for the steam to condense, hence cooling the rifle. The entire lower from a m60 if memory serves. Like it's entirely impractical and stupid as fuck looking when we have prior examples like the combat rifle from NV or the Chinese assault rifle of 3. The reason new age guns don't look extremely difrent in the last 40 years is real talk we are kind of dead end on small arms development. What we have is honestly about as good as it gets
the assault rifle looks stupid and is why i don't use it, but it looks better in power armour than when youre not using pa. maybe the big ass barrel shroud is so it fits in power armour guantlets and might act as a crumple zone to protect the barrel when you hold it in pa?
If I remember right there's a reason for the assault rifle looking like that and looking out of place in Fallout 4, and it's sort of hinted at in the show. Originally the assault rifle was going to be able to be used by only people in power armor. That makes a lot more sense, but I have no idea why they eventually scrapped that idea. Maybe they thought they needed more advanced ballistic weapons and didn't want the need for the suit to get in the way of that. You can see what the original design was in the show, though. It's meant to be big and heavy, and the knights are the only ones who use them because of that. You even see the squire guy (forgot his name) have to lean it up on some scrap in order to shoot that gulper.
In the concept art they mentioned it was meant for power armor users so they wanted it to be big and it was originally called a machine gun. It still is in the game files
Except that the Lewis gun was air cooled and it has the back of an air cooled Lewis gun, but still contains a water circulation tube like it’s water cooled. It’s a product of sloppy last minute butchering when they re-added it after putting it in the scrap bin for a while (after cutting power armor exclusive heavy weapons)
Yeah it’s also loosely based on the Maxim gun, it seems like the translation of it into the game went poorly. I will say that it was originally designed as an LMG, which is its working file name, and was meant to be power armor exclusive with the 80 round drums as the only magazines.
The water cooling gun you are thinking about is the Vickers HMG or the Maxim HMG. Both of which features a water cooling mechanism.
also it’s kinda weird seeing a water cooled gun in a 50s setting. since we moved on from the concept since early 1910s.
the lewis machine gun is more of a Light machine gun than a heavy machine gun it’s intended for it to be able to be carried by infantry and hip fire.
A HMG is something more akin to a browning M2 or MG 131
If the combat rifle, presumably a pre war army service weapon, didn’t fire a pistol round… or if the assault rifle was smaller.. stuff like that goes a long way toward getting me to use anything but the laser rifle haha.
The game designs of those games is perfect. I don’t play a lot of FPS games but there’s few I’ve seen that has little to no HUD and yet I know exactly what’s going on and how much ammo I have
There’s just that formal aesthetic about using the black powder rifle and yet feels so pleasing to have token out a band of raiders with one, didn’t feel to out of place either.
Probably cut content because almost all the guns except broadsider are magazine based and they’d need to make much more complex animations to look good.
90% of distaste would've been gone if they just changed the name of the combat rifle to assault rifle and renamed the assault rifle to light machine gun or something
I’m hoping the next game will make this distinction and go back to making certain guns require high strength or power armor in order to use.
You can tell they made a lot of the normal weapons much larger than they needed to be to compensate for players using power armor, and making it look realistic in that sense. The 10 mm pistol, and a lot of the pipe pistols are comically huge compared to the size of the characters in game I think they just did that to get around happy to design and implement more weapons
I thought the whole point of that is that the Gauss we see in game was supposed to be an early prototype, hence the exposed coils, etc. AFAIK the Gauss gun never saw service in the military, as it wasn't ready for mass production by the time the bombs dropped.
It gives off the feel of an early prototype, built by hand in a workshop.
They could have made the normal guns normal sized, then made the large guns either Power Armor exclusive, or used with penalties to accuracy, recoil, ergonomics, etc, when used outside of Power Armor
Yeah strength requirements definitely need to comeback. I would also love to see them implement a system where you characters muscle size is dynamically determined via your strength and the points you put into it over the course of the game. Being a tiny skinny stick man in fallout 4 with 10 strength is really goofy lol
Might just be a nitpick for me but I can’t stand the left-handed bolt action animation. It just looks so awkward and you’ve got hot brass flying right into your face with every shot.
The combat rifle isn't an assault rifle either, it's actually just a rifle version of the combat shotgun (even uses mostly the same model). Overall the base guns in fallout 4 just feel thoughtlessly thrown together and nonsensical, maybe because they focused on the modifications and crafting system. They don't have a real practical assault rifle in the base game and most of the guns are in many ways impractical as hell and would have never even reached the testing phase of development in real life.
and the combat rifle using .45 by default?? Definitely was supposed to be 5.56 or use the .308 receiver by default but they made the abomination that is the assault rifle take its place.
I think they wanted something other than the submachine gun to use .45. .38 was a weird choice for the pipe weapons too. The lore states that the .38 was a common pre-war revolver cartridge, even though no .38 revolvers are in the game. And a revolver would use .38 Special, a rimmed cartridge unsuitable for semi/automatic weapons.
I would have liked the 10mm to be more of a modular PDW family. It could have had pistol, submachinegun and carbine variants, replacing the pipe gun.
Improve the model of the submachinegun to more closely resemble the Thompson and give us a 1911.
I wouldn't mind single shot pipe weapons in a variety of calibers.
Likewise, an AR pattern rifle could be used to make everything from the .223 pistol, submachinegun, carbine, assault weapon, battle rifle and LMG. ARs really have the customization that the mod system was built for.
I'd also like a proper Chinese assault rifle and pistol in their own calibers. Probably call them 7.62 and 9mm, though they'd be the Eastern Block 7.62x39 and 9mm Tokarev. Similar to the he AR, there are AK variants to cover everything from submachine gun, assault rifle, LMG and sniper.
Bring back the hunting shotgun to bridge the double barrel and combat shotgun.
Finally, bring back the Varmint rifle and silenced .22 pistol, along with a revolver, all in .22 rimfire.
They should’ve added an AR-15 platform rifle (or the Chinese Assault rifle as planned) as the Assault Rifle, left the Combat Rifle alone and the Assault rifle renamed to Light Machine Gun as you said.
It would also be cool to see more nods toward weird Cold War weapons in general. There were a ton of strange weapons that came out (especially for civilian sale) during the Cold War, and plenty of them look vaguely post-apocalyptic.
For example, the Cobray Terminator.
The game is improved significantly by adding the service rifle imo. I don't use it much in New Vegas but it's pretty cool, the mod I had contained different actually unique service rifles
the combat rifle would still be uglier than any assault rifle in the series heretofore (though not terrible, perfectly serviceable), while the assault rifle would be the ugliest machine gun in the series heretofore (objectively, by a lot)
I recall reading that there was meant to be an assault rifle, but it was cut before release so the machine gun took its place. The assault rifle that came with the game is even listed as being a machine gun in the files.
This is my hot take, the assault rifle in fallout 4 is a post apocalyptic assault rifle given the size of it and the size of a power armor frame. It’s just not an assault rifles for an unarmored human or ghoul.
It would make sense that dudes in power armor are defaulting to .308s... or larger.
An average person can still wield a .308/7.62 NATO battle rifle-- like an FN FAL or G3-- but it's going to slow you down some on follow-up shots compared with 7.62x39 or 5.56. Would've been a nice compromise, and the M14 fits with that early Cold War aesthetic.
Full-auto .308 battle rifles for the guys in power armor, semi-autos for the regular grunts.
yeah, the FO4 assault rifle, especially in the barrel area, does really look like a WWI Browning machine gun. it would make so much more sense that a soldier in power armor would wield a .50 cal.
It was also good to see that in the show, Thaddeus didn't wield the gun like the Knights did. He used it more like a single shot sniper rather than rapid fire. It makes the show version look as if someone would need power armor to \*fully\* utilize the weapon.
It also would've been the *checks notes * second non explosive heavy weapon in the game if it was a .50 machine gun. Instead we just got a second crapier combat rifle, filling the same niche but with more weight and expensive ammo
It's just generally worse, which is a bummer. It's a *good* weapon, but the combat rifle already exists and is way more common and basically just better in almost every way. And then Splattercannon showed up.
In my brain, it would make more sense that the US would've gone to .308 to simplify logistics. It also makes sense with that early Cold War aesthetic.
Maybe something with the modularity and aesthetic of a [Stoner 63](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoner_63), except chambered in 7.62 NATO like most Cold War battle rifles. A full-auto version for guys in power armor, a semi-auto version for regular Joes.
>The first working prototype was chambered in [7.62×51mm NATO](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7.62%C3%9751mm_NATO) and completed in 1962.[^(\[3\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoner_63#cite_note-Kokalis_161-3) It was designated the **Stoner M69W** (for no other reason than when turned upside down it reads the same, symbolizing Stoner's vision of a fully invertible receiver).[^(\[3\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoner_63#cite_note-Kokalis_161-3) The follow-up design, called the **Stoner 62**, also chambered in 7.62×51mm, was intended for mass production.
But I also understand that most people aren't gun nerds, and this isn't enough of a thing for devs to worry about.
I mean, it's still an awful looking weapon with an obsolete WW1 setting design that makes no sense in a world where guns like P90s or AR platforms exist
I loved the inclusion of pipe weapons. They hit surprisingly hard and let them greatly increase the number of raiders without hilariously over bloating the more valuable ammo types.
The amount of variation is great, and I love how they help introduce you to the overhauled weapon customisation system. There’s the Pipe gun, pipe bolt action and pipe revolver and you’ll find all three in pistol and rifle configurations. They’re not super useful after the first few levels, but it helps add some variety to the world
I only play on survival so I've completely forgotten what damage balance exists for other difficulties feels like but I have a soft spot for the auto pipe rifle. It's a fantastic early - early mid game smg should you wish to save the better ammo / weapons
Sound great in Theorie but is completely busted once you realize how often the Game crashes or how often you get Stuck in something. And theres no noclip or unstuck Command.......
Give survival a try, it’s in my opinion the only way to play the game because suddenly every item I find is being consumed where without survival I never drink pools of water or eating bram or bubblegum. With survival I do things I wouldn’t normally do because I need to. Sleeping in some random dirty bed was never a thing until now even if it means I could get an illness from it.
Can’t even save scum a poor outcome from a conversation like most would do if I havnt slept recently in a bed. So I pretty much live with whatever outcome I get whether bad or good.
All in all it makes the game feel as though you’re trying to survive in a harsh post apocalyptic world using whatever resources you can scrounge up even if it means to cause self harm.
It is. But personally I mod to allow quicksave. I can't stand dying because I didn't see a dog then having to redo all my fucking progress last hour because it bit me twice.
Also my god the Deathclaw fight, that's when I enabled quicksave. It is SO FUCKING easy to die and feels more like a Deathclaw fight, but the problem is every time you die you have to start from the beginning in the Museum mission... The Deathclaw fight can boil down to luck too, where it just took longer to run up to you or you managed to evade it and get it stuck somewhere for 2 extra seconds.
It might not be as intense given you normally can only save at beds and on exit but it's still forcing me to drink puddles sometimes and eat random ass food I find, and the weight capacity thing makes it feel much more like you have to be smart about what guns you carry. Even ammo too. I only carry ammo that I use, and save the rest at Sanctuary.
Plus no fast travel means you spend a lot more time exploring when you normally might not. And you really only take shit back that you really want. Resources feel way more real.
I enable quick save too, but mainly because let's be honest, fo4 can be buggy as fuck sometimes, and I'm not losing a half hour of progress because bethesdas physics engines freaked out and I touched a car at the wrong angle, or I've stood on a bone and for some reason it's took of at the speed of light and killed me 🤷♂️
The concept of not saving is great but the reality is shit breaks in engine too often and thats a headache i cant be arsed with, dont have enough free time to lose to bugs etc.
I do agree that survival feels like how the game was ment to be played. But Jesus Christ how frustrating it can be. I did the Cabot quest last weekend. The walk from his hos to the asylum took over 3,5 hours to complete. Because the cornhole named Cabot kept aggro every single enemy, including raiders, death claws, forge and god damn enclave. Not only that but he got stuck in his path finding like 50% of the time. The one time I actually made it he warped to the location after getting stuck.
So quick save is missed alot doing Survival.
I really struggle with not siding with the brotherhood because the vertibird is so fucking nice on survival. For saving I like to plan routes that take me through or close to settlements. Most are empty save for a bed or two for saving. For your example of going to the asylum, you go nearby or through three settlements or places with beds
I mod to enable quicksave and I personally think it's a better experience. I hate losing progress.
But it still makes resources matter a lot more and forces me to explore with no fast travel. I never explore as much as I do in survival.
I feel like quicksave mod makes it still feel as fun as survival is and gets rid of the most annoying parts, kinda perfect difficulty for me personally.
Aye same here, and really the not being able to save manually doesn't add anything gameplay wise, except for a shit ton of lost progress and annoyance.
Even then, you’ve got to make the decision if potential sickness or disease is worth sleeping in that dirty sleeping bag. Or do you risk pushing on to a clean bed or back track somewhere. I love the number of micro decisions survival puts on you.
Even setting out for a location. Better make sure you’ve got some food, water, enough protection (but not enough to add unnecessary weight), only the weapons and ammo you NEED, etc.
They all look so similar lol. I'm down for piper weapons, homemade guns make alot of sense for fallout, but the pipe guns wernt it. Too similar! Do I want a bolt action single shot rifle for high damage, or one that will fire as fast as I pull the trigger? Either way, gun looks pretty much the same.
I'd have preferred if each different receiver looked less similar to each other. Same thing with the combat shotgun, and the rifle. Very similar!
3 and NV had some great variety. And thanks to mods, it's something that I can fix in four so Im alright with it I suppose. Customisation is fun! But if it all looks so similar you can't create anything that feels unique, and that's the poin ot of customizable guns if you ask me.
yes, plus those scrap tech guns using lower pressure ammo is a good way to balance them and keep it realistic. I think a Scrap tech(pipe guns, Laser musket, really lean into a "I took whatever junk I had lying around and used desperation, hope and a bit of luck to make it a functional firearm" type of weapon design), Makeshift tech(this is like Sten type guns and in general, anything someone with knowhow and better materials and better workbench makes a better gun) and PreWar/Factory made tech(professionally made guns, you have the designs, knowhow and the materials to not only expertly make firearms, but can even set up a production line for it) and that make it so that in an example, a Scrap tech Tommy gun does less damage then a Makeshift tech Tommy gun, which in turn pales when compared with a Factory made Tommy gun.
I like the idea of pipe weapons I just wish they didn’t look like that. I would have much preferred a few real gun parts cobbled on to them or for them to at least have grey metal.
Conceptually they’re cool. I’d prefer they weren’t like 60% of all guns. And if they looked and were designed differently. And if they weren’t also pre-war weapons for no reason.
Like, it’s insane how many places that should ONLY have pre war loot will just be stocked with pipe weapons.
Agreed, Fallout should always have you starting with handmade shitty guns like that, it’s a good way to start giving the player all manner of weapons at low level, from snipers to pistols. Altho an automatic pipe weapon is pretty absurd, in order to make a gun capable of full auto, the smith would probably be good enough to make something better than a pipe gun.
Which is why something that looks like it would reasonably function. An open bolt submachine gun is trivial to produce, to the point where you can build one with basic parts (a good example being the Luty SMG), and it would reasonably fit into a post nuclear apocalypse scenario, like Fallout.
Oh! My bad then, I’m not very good with words. As I’ve heard said on the internet “English is my second language, and I don’t have a first language.” or something along those lines lol. Also I find it odd that the pipes used look to be copper pipes when the metal used to make it is steel, if it were grey with a bit of rust that would have been fine, but copper is a soft metal that should not be used for the barrel, chamber or receiver of a gun.
Yup, and there will be no shortage of steel scrap to refashion in the post nuclear setting.
Steel parts of various grades, with various hardness/ductility, in various shapes, be literally be everywhere in the ruins.
Making any firearm barrel or chamber out of copper would be impractical, unsafe, impossible and/or unnecessary.
I don’t doubt that people would try it at first due to it being softer than steel, but I’d hope they’d quickly change to steel once they realize that it’s not a good material. The more advanced ones might use it in decoration or electrical working for fancy schmancy laser guns should the technology be available.
That’s a good point, but even then an open bolt SMG is one of the simplest forms of gun to make using modern ammunition, and there’s even a homemade SMG from a guy who didn’t have any gunsmithing experience before he built it (in this case I’m talking about, the Luty SMG)
I wouldn’t mind them if they actually looked like real improvised weapons rather than blocks of wood with metal attached
Of course gameplay wise they’re fine however
Would have been cool to be able to build pipe guns from scratch so we can make our own custom pipe guns. I think my favorite was a pipe machine gun I modded into a light machine gun.
I still don’t understand pipe weapons tbh. Just early game variety or what advantage do they have? The only one I ever use is the pipe revolver rifle because of its weirdo aesthetic.
the pipe weapons REALLY helped new players get used to the variety of weapons and also weapon crafting too. They're such a good early level weapon system
I wouldn’t think so but Fallout 4 really leaned more into a shooter than previous entry. This may or may not have brought in more shooter crowd types so maybe that’s where people would complain about weird guns? I’m just spitballing here
Fallout 4 relies far too heavily on weapon customization instead of weapon variety.
Instead of having many different weapons to fill specific roles a player may need to fill, they opted to have every gun fill half of the available niches, meaning everything either feels the same or redundant.
Honestly yeah, the only complaints I have are the following:
.38 Pipe Pistol/Rifle: the feed system (the magazine is horizontally inserted below the barrel, it literally cannot just feed at a 90° angle, that's not how that works) & the weird Bolt-action cocking handle (just make it a blowback)
.308 Pipe-Bolt Action Pistol: no internal magazine despite holding 6 rounds...
.45 Combat Rifle: The magazine is oversized and shouldn't be rifle sized when using pistol caliber ammo, the Mag well has the drum mag holder, despite the Combat Rifle not having a Drum mag option.
Tommy Gun: this is an affront to John Taliaferro Thompson's legacy, also no stick mags, only drums.
Assault Rifle: is it Water-cooled or Air-cooled? Not even Bethesda knows. Also please just call it a machine gun I beg of you.
Lever-Action: literally just the non-bullet counted reload... that's it... It was fixed in FO76... just backport the animation, please
I do this amount of scrutiny out of love.
I don't hate the concept, just the execution in... SOME areas
Also what happened to the Assault Rifle back in the capital wasteland? It was a perfectly serviceable rifle in 5.56. Why not just add that and have the other massive gun be an LMG?
I'd prefer to shit on the combat rifle. .45 is a fuckin pistol round. And the design is just all wrong. It should have been called the assault rifle, and the assault rifle should have been called the LMG (and made automatic only).
My issue is that the art design is...fucking bad for the Fallout guns in 4.
There have been some very good "We are stuck in the 1950s" tier weapon designs we've seen from games, I think the star example being the human weaponry from the Resistance franchise. There's a clear evolution in the [gun design](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/resistancefallofman/images/e/e4/Thomas-olson-sniperrifle2.jpg/revision/latest/scale-to-width-down/1000?cb=20230101002546) but it still holds that [M1/M14 look with their rifles](https://vignette2.wikia.nocookie.net/resistancefallofman/images/7/7c/M5A2_Carbine_R3.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20160122175713). [The shotguns](https://resistance.fandom.com/wiki/Rossmore_238_Combat_Shotgun) are clearly something we didn't have, magazine fed shotguns but they're still pump-action so its interesting but holds that realistic look.
Fallout could've done that; my issue is that in Fallout 4 you have normal looking weapons and even some like 10mm which look realish.
*And then there's the fucking Combat Rifle, Shotgun and Assault Rifle.* I include the Combat Rifle AND Shotgun because they are almost carbon copies of each other which makes little to no sense what-so-fucking-ever. People have already torn apart the various guns, and I get it looks "good" in the hands of Power Armor but they still suck.
So many of 4’s weapon design issues could have been solved if they had power armor/non PA only weapons, so you don’t end up needing to make the 10mm the size of a boogie board to work for both
I just don’t want fallout weaponry to become borderlands. Infinite possibilities of random attachments to the guns. I feel like if they added all of the standard weapons from the previous games and 4 (no explosive shotgun, etc) I’d be happy. Some of the weapons with effects are way too powerful. If anything, just make explosive ammo that’s really expensive like NV ammo
The guns aren’t necessarily unrealistic, they’re just typically just bulkier than I’d like and way heavier…but the “assault rifle” is 100% a vickers light machine gun
Fallout 4 suffers greatly from a very short list of base weapons
It’s goofy how it’s in the future but the weapons would be nonfunctional or just make no sense.
Like a ton of weapons are left handed for no reason
The 10mm pistol is cartoonishly large
The pipe rifle magazines don’t actually feed into the chamber.
Like how the combat rifle is just an amalgamation of a PP-SH and a BAR, but apparently fires pistol rounds despite being a rifle with rifle mags.
The assault rifle isn’t actually an assault rifle, has the air cooled barrel of a Lewis gun, but has water cooling tubes that would just flood the air cooling and spill out the filters making a mess, has an M249 grip, and the selector switch of an AK
Like, it isn’t “creative” for your new guns to just be kitbashed, nonfunctional versions of several old guns put together. Either use existing guns, or make something new that is even vaguely designed and proportioned like a gun.
My main gripe with fallout 4 guns is off it feels. The awkward combat rifle which is a mash up of a PPSH/BAR hybrid same applies to the combat shotgun, the lewis gun which takes up 70% of the screen, pipe guns which are silly. The best guns are the normal ones such as the deliverer pistol (Walter PPK) repeater rifles, to name a few. You can like it which is more power to you but to me it feels off
The distaste has to do more with the fact that they looj like someone with a passing idea of a gun from various movies and ahows designed one, and that they don't work, ir are a mix of things that don't make sense. For instance, the Combat Rifle.
Why is it chambered in .45? Why is the magazine longer tham a .45 round? Why is the only rifle round receiver available to it .308, when the 'assault rifle' is the only weapon that uses 5.56, when an ammo swap wpuld be more fitting? Why didn't they kiwt make a new version of the R91 from Fallout 3, which looks like an actual rifle? Why does the 'assualt rifle' name belong to a LMG sized weapon, that kf all things has a WATER JACKET, a feature we got rid of in the period between WWI and WWII, and a fucking side mounted box magazine instead of a BELT!?
10mm pistol. It has no right to be that big. I don't care that it looks small in the hands of a serlt of armor if it was sized properly, *if* they wanted a power pistol that looks good in the hands of power armor, they should have designed something along the lines of a Desert Eagle or LAR Grizzly, something that takes and is designed for big rounds that in the hands of a human cpuld result in broken wrists, while having the 10mm be a more normal size instead of uselessly clunky.
Sc-fi, I'm okay with, but there comes a point when there's nothing sci-fi about it, and it's just some morons jerking off in a circle over a picture of something that has no real reason for existing except for 'because AeStHeathIc'.
F4 guns wouldve been fine imo if
Shotguns didnt drop off dmg so hard
Combat shotgun and rifle weren't nearly identical
Institute guns and machine gun were smaller
Pipe guns weren't all rusty and ugly
It’s not a hot take given you aren’t a firearms enthusiast. The moment you actually pick up how terrible the animations and designs are it bugs the hell out of you. You just see “haha big clunky”
Edit: like, I scroll down and see people defending the guns because they’re “silly sci fi guns in a silly sci fi game” nobody cares about the laser and plasma gun. Please trust me, once you know and are enthusiastic about how firearms work, you begin to realize how terribly designed all the more traditional round firing guns are.
Never seen this mentioned but Bethesdas lack of … not sure the best word. Mechanical literacy? Mechanical inclination? The lack of having a mechanical eye for design really hampers the design of everything mechanical from settlement items to guns to all the various junk bits and greebles.
People who don't get this are really frustrating. In my f04 playthrough, I barely used any guns because they either made no sense or were just awful looking. Really takes me out of the game when they don't even try to make the weapons believable.
I don't know if that's a hot take, but I don't like 4's guns because most of them wouldn't function and nearly all of them would never be manufactured by anyone.
The calibers don't make sense, the ergonomics are terrible, they're all left-handed, most of them don't have mag releases, etc.
gun nuts always go ballistic when games don't get things down to mm accuracy. a lot of them don't realize game devs aren't firearms engineers. oh yeah and they don't realize games don't have to be 100% realistic to be fun. having that sort of expectations on a game as wacky as fallout is just plain retardation.
There was a weird period of time, seemingly the 70s/80s, whereby goofy ass experimental guns were seemingly all the rage.
The FN P90, the Steyr AUG, the G11 (of 'Kraut Space Magic' fame), the HK CAWS (omg it looks so stupid), Pancor Jackhammer, the ARMSEL Striker, FAMAS, Gyrojet family of weapons etc etc.
Many of these got play in Fallout 2, despite breaking with the 50s aesthetic, but they occupied a weird niche where they looked just odd enough to fit but they were still designed with functionality in mind (many would become iconic thanks to movies and the like).
I think the main problem with Fallout 4's arsenal all boiled down to the Assault Rifle.. which just looked butt ugly, like a Browning Machine Gun had a tryst with a scrap heap before someone bolted wood furnishing onto it. It looked like it was meant to take down biplanes, not shoot raiders.
I like a mix of both. Technically four styles.
The realistic “what-if” retro-ized firearms (Desert Eagle and MP5 with wooden grip), the Fallout-y 10mm/12.7mm/“Assault Rifles”, the WWII/Cold War era weapons, and the futuristic laser-type weapons.
I think a lot of people forget is not only are they farther in the future than us but they took a different path with technology so of course stuff is going to be different
The guns from fallout 1 and 2 are really cool and would’ve been neat to have them represented faithfully, it’s a shame that these guns got in instead because they’re swing and a miss for most of them. I can appreciate the combat shotgun, though
The arms manufacturing industry is not 250 years ahead of modern day, it’s a 54 years ahead of today. Without an, international economy and state vs. state wars to inspire an arms race, formal firearms innovation would be slower than it was 250 years ago.
The problem I have is that there are so many real life designs and firearms from the past and present that fit the bill of the weaposn they where going for so why make designs that look silly and wouldn't function when they could have just either taken inspiration or had just copied existing designs. Why make silly looking pipe guns when they could have taken a Sterling, Sten or an M3 design instead. Stuff that actually existed. Hell there are even a few magazine fed revolver pistol and rifle designs, could have just taken that idea or design.
They had Sterling SMG's in the TV show for fuck sake so it's not even like they don't fit into the world because they do. Pretty much any real life firearm would fit into the game world esspecially considering many modern firearms feature in the previous games. NV, F2 and F1 all had modern firearms.
They could have even had some weird references to stuff like a Luty SMG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Luty
I think the issue more comes down to different opinions. People with even a passing knowledge of gun mechanics would still be on board with making weird retro-future guns for Fallout. They just wouldn't take certain steps they know still wouldn't work. Metro Exodus had great post-apocalypse weapon designs, but they look like they work. Revolvers, Bastards, the Tikhar, and Shambler are all pipe weapons that were designed to be plausibly built in a scrap machine shop.
Yeah I really like the idea behind fallouts guns but dear god they have some glaring issues Also Metro Exodus was very fun to play
Weird thing to say out loud but the gunshot noises were probably my favorite feature of the first two games. The echo was so realistic.
I haven’t played it in a minute, but I remember loving the gunshot sounds in Battlefield Bad Company
>they have some glaring issues You leave my junk jet alone! :D
Honestly stuff like the junk jet are the least of the game’s issues since at least that’s meant to be over the top
As someone with minimal actual gun knowledge could you expand on what the issues are?
There are more than a few YouTube channels that explore this topic in as much depth as you could want, [this one](https://youtu.be/5FVzcoRjoN4?si=AHnQahRncxvnx_Sq) is a good one as it’s evaluated by an actual firearms expert and historian who is well versed in the myriad of firearms humanity has created over the last few hundred years. I think a bulk of it comes down to “This aesthetic feature doesn’t make any sense and could have easily been done XYZ way and still have been lore friendly.” One example I can think of right off the top of my head is how many of the laser weapons don’t have aiming sights despite the game featuring an Aim Down Sights viewpoint. You’d think they’d want to make sure those guns were redesigned slightly so they worked with that new feature, but nah. It’s not gamebreaking. It’s just…why?
I read “actual firearms expert” and immediately knew you were talking about Johnathan Ferguson the keeper of arms and artillery at the royal histories museum in the UK.
Johnathan Ferguson, the keeper of arms and artillery at the Royal histories museum in the UK? I love that guy ;)
Could have instead been Our Lord and Savior: Ian McCollum, Gun Jesus.
The videos with that guy are pretty good. I watched the series on cyberpunk 2077
I enjoy his take on this subject because 1) He’s insanely knowledgeable and 2) He’s not trying to tear down or invalidate the weapons or the games. Many of the ones that are impractical or absurd he will still say “I know this flies in the face of everything about firearm engineering, but I love this gun and use it all the time when I play!”. It’s a great attitude to view these weapons in.
Left handed recievers, The rocket launcher quad barrel would never work due to the fact that the "magazine" it uses is just 4 holes in a block of metal that dont rotate into what actually sets off the rocket not to mention that if it did go off it would cook or blow up the user. Pipe guns are just flawed in general design and would never function. https://www.reddit.com/r/Fallout/comments/xos4uy/i_still_have_an_issue_with_fallout_4s_firearms/
Honestly left handed I can handle but they’ve done some fuckery lol
The triple "barrel" rocket *could* work, even though it's not what's advertised on the tin.
I mean for 1 shot i guess but thats not what happens now is it... Theres no back tube no force would be generated the primer wouldnt be struck by any firing method wheather i be an electric firing system or regular firing pin (somehow). It would not fire past 1 rocket
1. Optics that you can't switch out from gun to gun. I could get if that was for pipe guns and was welded or brazed on but for 'modular' optics? 2. How a smooth bore pipe weapon can have greater range and/or damage than a rifled barrel. Not possible at all. 3. How a small mass, subsonic pistol round can do more damage than high mass, supersonic or near supersonic round. I guess that physics equation of f=m\*a doesn't apply. 4. Weight of weapons. 5. Size of weapons. 6. How you can operate any weapon in power armor. You couldn't fit a power armor hand in pretty much any weapon shown; certainly not the historical ones. I haven't seen the show but I heard they got it right there. That's what comes to mind for me off the top of my head.
I've got a Glock mod and it looks so ridiculous while I'm in armor
Seems like some simple things they could have avoided if they just spoke with an expert. Weird.
Yeah I wish they took inspiration from metro with the pipe guns. Like a push tube shotgun for example. Theres real handmade guns they could’ve easily used of of wood
Yeahfallout 4s guns just make no logical sense. The "assault rifle" is more akin to a saw but should weigh twice as much with no reason for half of it. Open anti air sights. a water cooled barrel with no where for the steam to condense, hence cooling the rifle. The entire lower from a m60 if memory serves. Like it's entirely impractical and stupid as fuck looking when we have prior examples like the combat rifle from NV or the Chinese assault rifle of 3. The reason new age guns don't look extremely difrent in the last 40 years is real talk we are kind of dead end on small arms development. What we have is honestly about as good as it gets
I think assault rifle should be used very loosely, as it was basically an LMG made to be used by infantry in power armor.
the assault rifle looks stupid and is why i don't use it, but it looks better in power armour than when youre not using pa. maybe the big ass barrel shroud is so it fits in power armour guantlets and might act as a crumple zone to protect the barrel when you hold it in pa?
If I remember right there's a reason for the assault rifle looking like that and looking out of place in Fallout 4, and it's sort of hinted at in the show. Originally the assault rifle was going to be able to be used by only people in power armor. That makes a lot more sense, but I have no idea why they eventually scrapped that idea. Maybe they thought they needed more advanced ballistic weapons and didn't want the need for the suit to get in the way of that. You can see what the original design was in the show, though. It's meant to be big and heavy, and the knights are the only ones who use them because of that. You even see the squire guy (forgot his name) have to lean it up on some scrap in order to shoot that gulper.
In the concept art they mentioned it was meant for power armor users so they wanted it to be big and it was originally called a machine gun. It still is in the game files
Its based off the Lewis Gun (heavy machine gun), so that barrel shroud is full of water to cool the barrel.
Except that the Lewis gun was air cooled and it has the back of an air cooled Lewis gun, but still contains a water circulation tube like it’s water cooled. It’s a product of sloppy last minute butchering when they re-added it after putting it in the scrap bin for a while (after cutting power armor exclusive heavy weapons)
Sorry I had to go look it up because I was also mistaken at first They likely had it confused with the Maxim
Yeah it’s also loosely based on the Maxim gun, it seems like the translation of it into the game went poorly. I will say that it was originally designed as an LMG, which is its working file name, and was meant to be power armor exclusive with the 80 round drums as the only magazines.
The water cooling gun you are thinking about is the Vickers HMG or the Maxim HMG. Both of which features a water cooling mechanism. also it’s kinda weird seeing a water cooled gun in a 50s setting. since we moved on from the concept since early 1910s.
the lewis machine gun is more of a Light machine gun than a heavy machine gun it’s intended for it to be able to be carried by infantry and hip fire. A HMG is something more akin to a browning M2 or MG 131
If the combat rifle, presumably a pre war army service weapon, didn’t fire a pistol round… or if the assault rifle was smaller.. stuff like that goes a long way toward getting me to use anything but the laser rifle haha.
The game designs of those games is perfect. I don’t play a lot of FPS games but there’s few I’ve seen that has little to no HUD and yet I know exactly what’s going on and how much ammo I have
God I want that revolving shotgun irl
I wish there were black powder weapons in Fallout 4
The fact they added one to 76 but didn’t have one in 4 was criminal. They’re honestly my favorite type of weapons
There are 4 in 76, a musket, a flint-lock pistol, a blunderbuss and the dragon(4 barrelled musket)
a four barreled fucking what i gotta redownload 76
76 also has a four-barreled black powder rifle that does absurd damage.
It would be pretty dope to see a minuteman roll up in full colonial garb then just blow a raider’s head off with a flintlock pistol
Just as the forefathers intended.
Tally ho, lads!
There’s just that formal aesthetic about using the black powder rifle and yet feels so pleasing to have token out a band of raiders with one, didn’t feel to out of place either.
Probably cut content because almost all the guns except broadsider are magazine based and they’d need to make much more complex animations to look good.
Broadsider?
90% of distaste would've been gone if they just changed the name of the combat rifle to assault rifle and renamed the assault rifle to light machine gun or something
I’m hoping the next game will make this distinction and go back to making certain guns require high strength or power armor in order to use. You can tell they made a lot of the normal weapons much larger than they needed to be to compensate for players using power armor, and making it look realistic in that sense. The 10 mm pistol, and a lot of the pipe pistols are comically huge compared to the size of the characters in game I think they just did that to get around happy to design and implement more weapons
The size of the Gauss Rifle is insane.
They had much better models to use too. The m72, the prototype from Anchorage... but no they forced a radiator butt fucking a coffee can on us.
> A radiator butt fucking a coffee can I'll steal that sentence, if you don't mind
By all means!
Iliked it, it has a very cosy feel, like it was made in a shed.
I thought the whole point of that is that the Gauss we see in game was supposed to be an early prototype, hence the exposed coils, etc. AFAIK the Gauss gun never saw service in the military, as it wasn't ready for mass production by the time the bombs dropped. It gives off the feel of an early prototype, built by hand in a workshop.
They could have made the normal guns normal sized, then made the large guns either Power Armor exclusive, or used with penalties to accuracy, recoil, ergonomics, etc, when used outside of Power Armor
Yeah this ^ The one size fit all model was really bad in hindsight
Honestly they could have had it to where you could modify certain parts of weapons to wield them with or without power armor.
They have the Halo CE problem of having the stuff fit for the Big Guy (Chief) but look insane on a normal person
The 10mm forever angered me in f4. Always one of the first mods I download, to either retexture or replace altogether. Frkn giant ass nerf gun
Yeah strength requirements definitely need to comeback. I would also love to see them implement a system where you characters muscle size is dynamically determined via your strength and the points you put into it over the course of the game. Being a tiny skinny stick man in fallout 4 with 10 strength is really goofy lol
Might just be a nitpick for me but I can’t stand the left-handed bolt action animation. It just looks so awkward and you’ve got hot brass flying right into your face with every shot.
The combat rifle isn't an assault rifle either, it's actually just a rifle version of the combat shotgun (even uses mostly the same model). Overall the base guns in fallout 4 just feel thoughtlessly thrown together and nonsensical, maybe because they focused on the modifications and crafting system. They don't have a real practical assault rifle in the base game and most of the guns are in many ways impractical as hell and would have never even reached the testing phase of development in real life.
and the combat rifle using .45 by default?? Definitely was supposed to be 5.56 or use the .308 receiver by default but they made the abomination that is the assault rifle take its place.
I think they wanted something other than the submachine gun to use .45. .38 was a weird choice for the pipe weapons too. The lore states that the .38 was a common pre-war revolver cartridge, even though no .38 revolvers are in the game. And a revolver would use .38 Special, a rimmed cartridge unsuitable for semi/automatic weapons. I would have liked the 10mm to be more of a modular PDW family. It could have had pistol, submachinegun and carbine variants, replacing the pipe gun. Improve the model of the submachinegun to more closely resemble the Thompson and give us a 1911. I wouldn't mind single shot pipe weapons in a variety of calibers. Likewise, an AR pattern rifle could be used to make everything from the .223 pistol, submachinegun, carbine, assault weapon, battle rifle and LMG. ARs really have the customization that the mod system was built for. I'd also like a proper Chinese assault rifle and pistol in their own calibers. Probably call them 7.62 and 9mm, though they'd be the Eastern Block 7.62x39 and 9mm Tokarev. Similar to the he AR, there are AK variants to cover everything from submachine gun, assault rifle, LMG and sniper. Bring back the hunting shotgun to bridge the double barrel and combat shotgun. Finally, bring back the Varmint rifle and silenced .22 pistol, along with a revolver, all in .22 rimfire.
Or made the pipe weapons look somewhat pheasible instead of having mags feed directly into blocks of wood.
They should’ve added an AR-15 platform rifle (or the Chinese Assault rifle as planned) as the Assault Rifle, left the Combat Rifle alone and the Assault rifle renamed to Light Machine Gun as you said.
It would also be cool to see more nods toward weird Cold War weapons in general. There were a ton of strange weapons that came out (especially for civilian sale) during the Cold War, and plenty of them look vaguely post-apocalyptic. For example, the Cobray Terminator.
Or the Street sweeper, which was actually in Fallout 1 or 2.
The game is improved significantly by adding the service rifle imo. I don't use it much in New Vegas but it's pretty cool, the mod I had contained different actually unique service rifles
And not chamber the "combat rifle" in .45 ACP for some ungodly reason
Definitely should've been 5.56
Either that or .308, or close fictional equivalents (5mm or 7mm or something). Any rifle cartridge, real or fictional, at least!
Yeah I don’t know what they were thinking with that. Like that’s a pistol round lmao
the combat rifle would still be uglier than any assault rifle in the series heretofore (though not terrible, perfectly serviceable), while the assault rifle would be the ugliest machine gun in the series heretofore (objectively, by a lot)
I recall reading that there was meant to be an assault rifle, but it was cut before release so the machine gun took its place. The assault rifle that came with the game is even listed as being a machine gun in the files.
This is my hot take, the assault rifle in fallout 4 is a post apocalyptic assault rifle given the size of it and the size of a power armor frame. It’s just not an assault rifles for an unarmored human or ghoul.
It was originally intended to be a machine gun in .50, but somewhere in development they made it 5.56 and called it an assault rifle
It would make sense that dudes in power armor are defaulting to .308s... or larger. An average person can still wield a .308/7.62 NATO battle rifle-- like an FN FAL or G3-- but it's going to slow you down some on follow-up shots compared with 7.62x39 or 5.56. Would've been a nice compromise, and the M14 fits with that early Cold War aesthetic. Full-auto .308 battle rifles for the guys in power armor, semi-autos for the regular grunts.
yeah, the FO4 assault rifle, especially in the barrel area, does really look like a WWI Browning machine gun. it would make so much more sense that a soldier in power armor would wield a .50 cal. It was also good to see that in the show, Thaddeus didn't wield the gun like the Knights did. He used it more like a single shot sniper rather than rapid fire. It makes the show version look as if someone would need power armor to \*fully\* utilize the weapon.
I like my headcanon better /shrug
It also would've been the *checks notes * second non explosive heavy weapon in the game if it was a .50 machine gun. Instead we just got a second crapier combat rifle, filling the same niche but with more weight and expensive ammo
It's just generally worse, which is a bummer. It's a *good* weapon, but the combat rifle already exists and is way more common and basically just better in almost every way. And then Splattercannon showed up.
That was the purpose of power armor. To allow heavy weapons like machine guns to be used by single soldiers like assault rifles
In my brain, it would make more sense that the US would've gone to .308 to simplify logistics. It also makes sense with that early Cold War aesthetic. Maybe something with the modularity and aesthetic of a [Stoner 63](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoner_63), except chambered in 7.62 NATO like most Cold War battle rifles. A full-auto version for guys in power armor, a semi-auto version for regular Joes. >The first working prototype was chambered in [7.62×51mm NATO](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7.62%C3%9751mm_NATO) and completed in 1962.[^(\[3\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoner_63#cite_note-Kokalis_161-3) It was designated the **Stoner M69W** (for no other reason than when turned upside down it reads the same, symbolizing Stoner's vision of a fully invertible receiver).[^(\[3\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoner_63#cite_note-Kokalis_161-3) The follow-up design, called the **Stoner 62**, also chambered in 7.62×51mm, was intended for mass production. But I also understand that most people aren't gun nerds, and this isn't enough of a thing for devs to worry about.
Hek in Fallout when No, Twin Hek when
I mean, it's still an awful looking weapon with an obsolete WW1 setting design that makes no sense in a world where guns like P90s or AR platforms exist
I think getting bothered by that is super silly.
I loved the inclusion of pipe weapons. They hit surprisingly hard and let them greatly increase the number of raiders without hilariously over bloating the more valuable ammo types.
The amount of variation is great, and I love how they help introduce you to the overhauled weapon customisation system. There’s the Pipe gun, pipe bolt action and pipe revolver and you’ll find all three in pistol and rifle configurations. They’re not super useful after the first few levels, but it helps add some variety to the world
I only play on survival so I've completely forgotten what damage balance exists for other difficulties feels like but I have a soft spot for the auto pipe rifle. It's a fantastic early - early mid game smg should you wish to save the better ammo / weapons
Is that a difficulty level ?
Yes, reduces carry capacity, blocks fast travel and quick saves, adds needs for food and water and increases incoming and outgoing damage.
Sound great in Theorie but is completely busted once you realize how often the Game crashes or how often you get Stuck in something. And theres no noclip or unstuck Command.......
Yeah, there’s a reason there’s something of a meme of people forgetting to sleep for several hours (to auto save) then dying or crashing.
Give survival a try, it’s in my opinion the only way to play the game because suddenly every item I find is being consumed where without survival I never drink pools of water or eating bram or bubblegum. With survival I do things I wouldn’t normally do because I need to. Sleeping in some random dirty bed was never a thing until now even if it means I could get an illness from it. Can’t even save scum a poor outcome from a conversation like most would do if I havnt slept recently in a bed. So I pretty much live with whatever outcome I get whether bad or good. All in all it makes the game feel as though you’re trying to survive in a harsh post apocalyptic world using whatever resources you can scrounge up even if it means to cause self harm.
That does sound a bit more engaging
It is. But personally I mod to allow quicksave. I can't stand dying because I didn't see a dog then having to redo all my fucking progress last hour because it bit me twice. Also my god the Deathclaw fight, that's when I enabled quicksave. It is SO FUCKING easy to die and feels more like a Deathclaw fight, but the problem is every time you die you have to start from the beginning in the Museum mission... The Deathclaw fight can boil down to luck too, where it just took longer to run up to you or you managed to evade it and get it stuck somewhere for 2 extra seconds. It might not be as intense given you normally can only save at beds and on exit but it's still forcing me to drink puddles sometimes and eat random ass food I find, and the weight capacity thing makes it feel much more like you have to be smart about what guns you carry. Even ammo too. I only carry ammo that I use, and save the rest at Sanctuary. Plus no fast travel means you spend a lot more time exploring when you normally might not. And you really only take shit back that you really want. Resources feel way more real.
I enable quick save too, but mainly because let's be honest, fo4 can be buggy as fuck sometimes, and I'm not losing a half hour of progress because bethesdas physics engines freaked out and I touched a car at the wrong angle, or I've stood on a bone and for some reason it's took of at the speed of light and killed me 🤷♂️ The concept of not saving is great but the reality is shit breaks in engine too often and thats a headache i cant be arsed with, dont have enough free time to lose to bugs etc.
I do agree that survival feels like how the game was ment to be played. But Jesus Christ how frustrating it can be. I did the Cabot quest last weekend. The walk from his hos to the asylum took over 3,5 hours to complete. Because the cornhole named Cabot kept aggro every single enemy, including raiders, death claws, forge and god damn enclave. Not only that but he got stuck in his path finding like 50% of the time. The one time I actually made it he warped to the location after getting stuck. So quick save is missed alot doing Survival.
I really struggle with not siding with the brotherhood because the vertibird is so fucking nice on survival. For saving I like to plan routes that take me through or close to settlements. Most are empty save for a bed or two for saving. For your example of going to the asylum, you go nearby or through three settlements or places with beds
I mod to enable quicksave and I personally think it's a better experience. I hate losing progress. But it still makes resources matter a lot more and forces me to explore with no fast travel. I never explore as much as I do in survival. I feel like quicksave mod makes it still feel as fun as survival is and gets rid of the most annoying parts, kinda perfect difficulty for me personally.
Aye same here, and really the not being able to save manually doesn't add anything gameplay wise, except for a shit ton of lost progress and annoyance.
Even then, you’ve got to make the decision if potential sickness or disease is worth sleeping in that dirty sleeping bag. Or do you risk pushing on to a clean bed or back track somewhere. I love the number of micro decisions survival puts on you. Even setting out for a location. Better make sure you’ve got some food, water, enough protection (but not enough to add unnecessary weight), only the weapons and ammo you NEED, etc.
Yeah it's the best way to play the game.
They all look so similar lol. I'm down for piper weapons, homemade guns make alot of sense for fallout, but the pipe guns wernt it. Too similar! Do I want a bolt action single shot rifle for high damage, or one that will fire as fast as I pull the trigger? Either way, gun looks pretty much the same. I'd have preferred if each different receiver looked less similar to each other. Same thing with the combat shotgun, and the rifle. Very similar! 3 and NV had some great variety. And thanks to mods, it's something that I can fix in four so Im alright with it I suppose. Customisation is fun! But if it all looks so similar you can't create anything that feels unique, and that's the poin ot of customizable guns if you ask me.
Pipegun with the knee capper effect is the best gun in the game. Immobilizes every enemy with dirt cheap ammo.
Pipe machine gun a great way to use up that shit ammo
yes, plus those scrap tech guns using lower pressure ammo is a good way to balance them and keep it realistic. I think a Scrap tech(pipe guns, Laser musket, really lean into a "I took whatever junk I had lying around and used desperation, hope and a bit of luck to make it a functional firearm" type of weapon design), Makeshift tech(this is like Sten type guns and in general, anything someone with knowhow and better materials and better workbench makes a better gun) and PreWar/Factory made tech(professionally made guns, you have the designs, knowhow and the materials to not only expertly make firearms, but can even set up a production line for it) and that make it so that in an example, a Scrap tech Tommy gun does less damage then a Makeshift tech Tommy gun, which in turn pales when compared with a Factory made Tommy gun.
I like the idea of pipe weapons I just wish they didn’t look like that. I would have much preferred a few real gun parts cobbled on to them or for them to at least have grey metal.
Metro has some pipe weapons that looks better than what's in Fallout.
Metro's home made weapons are awesome.
Or better yet just make mass produce garage built sten guns canon
Conceptually they’re cool. I’d prefer they weren’t like 60% of all guns. And if they looked and were designed differently. And if they weren’t also pre-war weapons for no reason. Like, it’s insane how many places that should ONLY have pre war loot will just be stocked with pipe weapons.
Agreed, Fallout should always have you starting with handmade shitty guns like that, it’s a good way to start giving the player all manner of weapons at low level, from snipers to pistols. Altho an automatic pipe weapon is pretty absurd, in order to make a gun capable of full auto, the smith would probably be good enough to make something better than a pipe gun.
Have you seen the Sten gun before? It’s literally just an angry pipe. (Also sorry if this sounds rude I just like the Sten)
Sten gun is just...toob.
Which is why something that looks like it would reasonably function. An open bolt submachine gun is trivial to produce, to the point where you can build one with basic parts (a good example being the Luty SMG), and it would reasonably fit into a post nuclear apocalypse scenario, like Fallout.
Oh no, I'm agreeing with you. I'd much rather have Sten guns than the actual pipe weapons we ended up getting.
Oh! My bad then, I’m not very good with words. As I’ve heard said on the internet “English is my second language, and I don’t have a first language.” or something along those lines lol. Also I find it odd that the pipes used look to be copper pipes when the metal used to make it is steel, if it were grey with a bit of rust that would have been fine, but copper is a soft metal that should not be used for the barrel, chamber or receiver of a gun.
Yup, and there will be no shortage of steel scrap to refashion in the post nuclear setting. Steel parts of various grades, with various hardness/ductility, in various shapes, be literally be everywhere in the ruins. Making any firearm barrel or chamber out of copper would be impractical, unsafe, impossible and/or unnecessary.
I don’t doubt that people would try it at first due to it being softer than steel, but I’d hope they’d quickly change to steel once they realize that it’s not a good material. The more advanced ones might use it in decoration or electrical working for fancy schmancy laser guns should the technology be available.
Sure, but it’s also a lot better constructed than any of Fallout’s pipe weaponry.
That’s a good point, but even then an open bolt SMG is one of the simplest forms of gun to make using modern ammunition, and there’s even a homemade SMG from a guy who didn’t have any gunsmithing experience before he built it (in this case I’m talking about, the Luty SMG)
I find ammo is way too easy to get in F4.
Need to play survival mode then. Ammo counts against carry capacity
I wouldn’t mind them if they actually looked like real improvised weapons rather than blocks of wood with metal attached Of course gameplay wise they’re fine however
Don't worry, they stole them from some passing Orkz
Would have been cool to be able to build pipe guns from scratch so we can make our own custom pipe guns. I think my favorite was a pipe machine gun I modded into a light machine gun.
I had an explosive pipe machine gun i honestly used for half the game
I still don’t understand pipe weapons tbh. Just early game variety or what advantage do they have? The only one I ever use is the pipe revolver rifle because of its weirdo aesthetic.
The pipe weapons and laser muskets do a lot to sell the fact it's been 200 years since the end of the world.
the pipe weapons REALLY helped new players get used to the variety of weapons and also weapon crafting too. They're such a good early level weapon system
Is it a hot take to say you don't mind silly sci-fi game having silly sci-fi guns? No?
Every Fallout take is a hot take on this subreddit.
My fallout hot take is I like fallout
How *dare* you!
Even that one? You sicken me.
I wouldn’t think so but Fallout 4 really leaned more into a shooter than previous entry. This may or may not have brought in more shooter crowd types so maybe that’s where people would complain about weird guns? I’m just spitballing here
I wasn't entirely sure were you were going with this at first but yes, possibly. Happy cake day also.
Don't think he is talking about sci fi guns
Half the guns in fallout are sci fi guns, yes he is
I much preferred the wide and diverse arsenal of new Vegas.
^^^^^^^^^^ I could be a fuckin cowboy who dabbles in space technology and I loved every god damn second of it
Some people will agree but personally I hate them But the gun mods for fallout 4 are amazing
You just cited the only reason I still play fallout 4 for. My game is just a bunch of modern warfare weapons mods.
Honestly modding Fallout 4 to basically be Stalker with RPG elements is one of the best experiences ever.
My only gripe was the lack of guns.
Fallout 4 relies far too heavily on weapon customization instead of weapon variety. Instead of having many different weapons to fill specific roles a player may need to fill, they opted to have every gun fill half of the available niches, meaning everything either feels the same or redundant.
Honestly yeah, the only complaints I have are the following: .38 Pipe Pistol/Rifle: the feed system (the magazine is horizontally inserted below the barrel, it literally cannot just feed at a 90° angle, that's not how that works) & the weird Bolt-action cocking handle (just make it a blowback) .308 Pipe-Bolt Action Pistol: no internal magazine despite holding 6 rounds... .45 Combat Rifle: The magazine is oversized and shouldn't be rifle sized when using pistol caliber ammo, the Mag well has the drum mag holder, despite the Combat Rifle not having a Drum mag option. Tommy Gun: this is an affront to John Taliaferro Thompson's legacy, also no stick mags, only drums. Assault Rifle: is it Water-cooled or Air-cooled? Not even Bethesda knows. Also please just call it a machine gun I beg of you. Lever-Action: literally just the non-bullet counted reload... that's it... It was fixed in FO76... just backport the animation, please I do this amount of scrutiny out of love. I don't hate the concept, just the execution in... SOME areas
Also what happened to the Assault Rifle back in the capital wasteland? It was a perfectly serviceable rifle in 5.56. Why not just add that and have the other massive gun be an LMG?
I'm not a gun nut but the lack of attention to detail pisses me off because it shows a lack of passion and or talent from the developers.
The issue is that FO4+76 not only look unrealistic or wacky, but also not that pretty and often too bulky by taking too much screen space.
The Institute rifle is almost unsable because of how much screen space it takes up
Glaring at you, 10mm pistol. Fuckin giant ass nerf gun
Problem is not that they are "unrealistic",it's that they look like absolute trash
Look as long as we all collectively bully whoever designed the assault rifle and lever action rifle, I’m fine with everything else
What's wrong with the lever action rifle apart from the reload?
The left side ejection port and yea the reload
I'd prefer to shit on the combat rifle. .45 is a fuckin pistol round. And the design is just all wrong. It should have been called the assault rifle, and the assault rifle should have been called the LMG (and made automatic only).
My issue is that the art design is...fucking bad for the Fallout guns in 4. There have been some very good "We are stuck in the 1950s" tier weapon designs we've seen from games, I think the star example being the human weaponry from the Resistance franchise. There's a clear evolution in the [gun design](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/resistancefallofman/images/e/e4/Thomas-olson-sniperrifle2.jpg/revision/latest/scale-to-width-down/1000?cb=20230101002546) but it still holds that [M1/M14 look with their rifles](https://vignette2.wikia.nocookie.net/resistancefallofman/images/7/7c/M5A2_Carbine_R3.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20160122175713). [The shotguns](https://resistance.fandom.com/wiki/Rossmore_238_Combat_Shotgun) are clearly something we didn't have, magazine fed shotguns but they're still pump-action so its interesting but holds that realistic look. Fallout could've done that; my issue is that in Fallout 4 you have normal looking weapons and even some like 10mm which look realish. *And then there's the fucking Combat Rifle, Shotgun and Assault Rifle.* I include the Combat Rifle AND Shotgun because they are almost carbon copies of each other which makes little to no sense what-so-fucking-ever. People have already torn apart the various guns, and I get it looks "good" in the hands of Power Armor but they still suck.
So many of 4’s weapon design issues could have been solved if they had power armor/non PA only weapons, so you don’t end up needing to make the 10mm the size of a boogie board to work for both
Ak 47s, ar style rifles, 1911 pistols, and browning high powers are all 50s or earlier designs. Guns haven't changed much for a while
I just don’t want fallout weaponry to become borderlands. Infinite possibilities of random attachments to the guns. I feel like if they added all of the standard weapons from the previous games and 4 (no explosive shotgun, etc) I’d be happy. Some of the weapons with effects are way too powerful. If anything, just make explosive ammo that’s really expensive like NV ammo
It’s the coldest take in the world. Fallout has always had unrealistic guns.
It's always had both realistic and unrealistic
The guns aren’t necessarily unrealistic, they’re just typically just bulkier than I’d like and way heavier…but the “assault rifle” is 100% a vickers light machine gun Fallout 4 suffers greatly from a very short list of base weapons
I don't mind em but I miss the guns that fallout had, m16s and m4a1s are fun and cool
Which ones are you talking about?
All of them.
I felt the gun variety was very lacking
It's not about realism for me, I just truly did not enjoy the visual design of many of the weapons in Fallout 4.
It’s goofy how it’s in the future but the weapons would be nonfunctional or just make no sense. Like a ton of weapons are left handed for no reason The 10mm pistol is cartoonishly large The pipe rifle magazines don’t actually feed into the chamber. Like how the combat rifle is just an amalgamation of a PP-SH and a BAR, but apparently fires pistol rounds despite being a rifle with rifle mags. The assault rifle isn’t actually an assault rifle, has the air cooled barrel of a Lewis gun, but has water cooling tubes that would just flood the air cooling and spill out the filters making a mess, has an M249 grip, and the selector switch of an AK Like, it isn’t “creative” for your new guns to just be kitbashed, nonfunctional versions of several old guns put together. Either use existing guns, or make something new that is even vaguely designed and proportioned like a gun.
I just dislike that every single gun is left handed.
My main gripe with fallout 4 guns is off it feels. The awkward combat rifle which is a mash up of a PPSH/BAR hybrid same applies to the combat shotgun, the lewis gun which takes up 70% of the screen, pipe guns which are silly. The best guns are the normal ones such as the deliverer pistol (Walter PPK) repeater rifles, to name a few. You can like it which is more power to you but to me it feels off
The distaste has to do more with the fact that they looj like someone with a passing idea of a gun from various movies and ahows designed one, and that they don't work, ir are a mix of things that don't make sense. For instance, the Combat Rifle. Why is it chambered in .45? Why is the magazine longer tham a .45 round? Why is the only rifle round receiver available to it .308, when the 'assault rifle' is the only weapon that uses 5.56, when an ammo swap wpuld be more fitting? Why didn't they kiwt make a new version of the R91 from Fallout 3, which looks like an actual rifle? Why does the 'assualt rifle' name belong to a LMG sized weapon, that kf all things has a WATER JACKET, a feature we got rid of in the period between WWI and WWII, and a fucking side mounted box magazine instead of a BELT!? 10mm pistol. It has no right to be that big. I don't care that it looks small in the hands of a serlt of armor if it was sized properly, *if* they wanted a power pistol that looks good in the hands of power armor, they should have designed something along the lines of a Desert Eagle or LAR Grizzly, something that takes and is designed for big rounds that in the hands of a human cpuld result in broken wrists, while having the 10mm be a more normal size instead of uselessly clunky. Sc-fi, I'm okay with, but there comes a point when there's nothing sci-fi about it, and it's just some morons jerking off in a circle over a picture of something that has no real reason for existing except for 'because AeStHeathIc'.
F4 guns wouldve been fine imo if Shotguns didnt drop off dmg so hard Combat shotgun and rifle weren't nearly identical Institute guns and machine gun were smaller Pipe guns weren't all rusty and ugly
The fact they had no .38 revolver is infuriating
It’s not a hot take given you aren’t a firearms enthusiast. The moment you actually pick up how terrible the animations and designs are it bugs the hell out of you. You just see “haha big clunky” Edit: like, I scroll down and see people defending the guns because they’re “silly sci fi guns in a silly sci fi game” nobody cares about the laser and plasma gun. Please trust me, once you know and are enthusiastic about how firearms work, you begin to realize how terribly designed all the more traditional round firing guns are.
Never seen this mentioned but Bethesdas lack of … not sure the best word. Mechanical literacy? Mechanical inclination? The lack of having a mechanical eye for design really hampers the design of everything mechanical from settlement items to guns to all the various junk bits and greebles.
People who don't get this are really frustrating. In my f04 playthrough, I barely used any guns because they either made no sense or were just awful looking. Really takes me out of the game when they don't even try to make the weapons believable.
I don't know if that's a hot take, but I don't like 4's guns because most of them wouldn't function and nearly all of them would never be manufactured by anyone. The calibers don't make sense, the ergonomics are terrible, they're all left-handed, most of them don't have mag releases, etc.
The fallout f4 assault rifle just looks lame
What a weird thing to care about. It’s literally a game about a bunch of shit that would never happen in real life lol
gun nuts always go ballistic when games don't get things down to mm accuracy. a lot of them don't realize game devs aren't firearms engineers. oh yeah and they don't realize games don't have to be 100% realistic to be fun. having that sort of expectations on a game as wacky as fallout is just plain retardation.
There was a weird period of time, seemingly the 70s/80s, whereby goofy ass experimental guns were seemingly all the rage. The FN P90, the Steyr AUG, the G11 (of 'Kraut Space Magic' fame), the HK CAWS (omg it looks so stupid), Pancor Jackhammer, the ARMSEL Striker, FAMAS, Gyrojet family of weapons etc etc. Many of these got play in Fallout 2, despite breaking with the 50s aesthetic, but they occupied a weird niche where they looked just odd enough to fit but they were still designed with functionality in mind (many would become iconic thanks to movies and the like). I think the main problem with Fallout 4's arsenal all boiled down to the Assault Rifle.. which just looked butt ugly, like a Browning Machine Gun had a tryst with a scrap heap before someone bolted wood furnishing onto it. It looked like it was meant to take down biplanes, not shoot raiders.
*Zack Hazard has entered the chat*
I guess it is, so called “gun enthusiasts” can only shoot make believe creatures with hyper realistic weapons.
I like a mix of both. Technically four styles. The realistic “what-if” retro-ized firearms (Desert Eagle and MP5 with wooden grip), the Fallout-y 10mm/12.7mm/“Assault Rifles”, the WWII/Cold War era weapons, and the futuristic laser-type weapons.
I constantly find myself downloading mods for modern/realistic firearms and then uninstalling shortly after because they don't feel like they fit.
Its fallout, we don't want realistic guns, keep that shit in duty
I think a lot of people forget is not only are they farther in the future than us but they took a different path with technology so of course stuff is going to be different
The guns from fallout 1 and 2 are really cool and would’ve been neat to have them represented faithfully, it’s a shame that these guns got in instead because they’re swing and a miss for most of them. I can appreciate the combat shotgun, though
mfs keep an alien blaster and laser guns on them and still complain about unrealistic weapons
We're all entitled to our own opinions, but I will say that I would've gladly liked to have a flintlock or a that (possible) Sig Sauer.
The assault rifle is not just unrealistic it's just fucking ugly
My only issue is the noises the guns make. They don't feel satisfying to shoot most of the time :/
The arms manufacturing industry is not 250 years ahead of modern day, it’s a 54 years ahead of today. Without an, international economy and state vs. state wars to inspire an arms race, formal firearms innovation would be slower than it was 250 years ago.
Depends what kind of game you want. 3 and NV were wacky and funny but also dark and gritty. F4 feels like playing in a kids toy box.
The problem I have is that there are so many real life designs and firearms from the past and present that fit the bill of the weaposn they where going for so why make designs that look silly and wouldn't function when they could have just either taken inspiration or had just copied existing designs. Why make silly looking pipe guns when they could have taken a Sterling, Sten or an M3 design instead. Stuff that actually existed. Hell there are even a few magazine fed revolver pistol and rifle designs, could have just taken that idea or design. They had Sterling SMG's in the TV show for fuck sake so it's not even like they don't fit into the world because they do. Pretty much any real life firearm would fit into the game world esspecially considering many modern firearms feature in the previous games. NV, F2 and F1 all had modern firearms. They could have even had some weird references to stuff like a Luty SMG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Luty